Over 10 lakh people turned up to listen to PM Modi addressing the BJP Parivartan Rally at Lucknow on Monday

Ifirst met Parasmal Lodha three decades ago in Bombay. I was editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India at the time, and he dropped by (he claimed) to inform me that he had acquired Amrita Bazar Patrika, one of Calcutta’s leading newspaper houses at the time, and asked if I would like to suggest some smart people to him who could steer the revamp of both the English and Bengali newspapers that they published.

There was no Google in those days. So I had to ask around if anyone knew of him and what he did, and whether he had actually acquired the newspaper group. (No, he didn’t quite look like a guy who would buy a newspaper.) What I discovered was quite different. He had arrived at some fancy and complex real estate deal with the newspaper house, which allowed him to develop their considerable landed assets in return for control over their newspapers which were at the time, despite their large circulations, languishing for lack of adequate financial liquidity.

During my inquiries, I also discovered that Lodha’s main claim to fame was that he acquired the terraces of wellknown buildings in Calcutta, and then used his political clout to build extra, illegal floors on them. This earned him the colourful sobriquet of Fiddler on the Roof. (Yes, you are right. Journalists picked up the title from the famous Topol movie.) Over the past three decades, I have occasionally heard of Lodha’s rise to fame and success. From Calcutta’s roofs, he migrated to Delhi’s farmhouses and, as someone informed me some years back, to Mozambique’s mines and many other places scattered across the world where land and political influence are the currency in which huge fortunes are built overnight.

His name would crop up in unlikely contexts, and once I remember receiving a wedding card from him for his daughter’s marriage. Whispers on Delhi’s political grapevine claimed Vladimir Putin would come to give away the girl. No such thing happened, but of stories like these the legend of Parasmal Lodha grew. In between, I heard he had acquired arespected, 70-year-old family-owned business house in Calcutta with interests in hotels, hospitals, real estate and financial products. That news, again, proved to be untrue.

He had tried to strike a deal with them but it fell through midway. The owners found him unreliable. The matter has been in courts for years now, but Lodha is not allowed to get anywhere near the company any more. But this column is not about Lodha. It begins with him because he has been grabbing the headlines all of last week, for being caught laundering other people’s money. Vast sums of money, which got exposed when the demonetisation drive brought the investigating agencies to his door.

He is alleged to be one among many people, influential and well connected, who have been living off the profitable business of exploiting their political and official contacts in Government to make vast sums of money in our corrupt and controlled economy. A leading magazine carried a story recently, claiming that Lodha was also in the business of promising people favourable judicial verdicts in return for cash. How much of this is true I have no idea, but what never ceases to amaze me is how ugly the underbelly of all deal making in India is.

There’s no Art of the Deal here, as Trump calls it. It’s all grimy and sleazy, run by middlemen who negotiate between those in power and the rest of us. I am sure many other countries bear the same cross. But, in India, corruption has been virtually institutionalised. There are rate cards floating around everywhere, and there are people like Lodha who can fix you virtually anything. For they alone know how to manage the system. The rest of us are all at sea. This is the real reason why despite all the pain and suffering that common people have been going through, they continue to support Prime Minister Modi’s demonetisation drive.

They are sick and tired of the corruption everywhere. You and I only read about the big scams in the newspapers. But the common man lives with corruption every day, in every aspect of his unfortunate life. Even a beggar pays a bribe to the neighbourhood cop, or the local goon for that tiny part of the footpath he occupies at night. That is why everyone is so angry and frustrated. They love it when they see men like Lodha caught. For them, demonetisation is part of a cleansing process. That is why they are willing to suffer the pain that accompanies it.

You and I may think this is too high a price to pay for fighting corruption. Poor people, in fact, have suffered the most. The humiliation of standing in queue for days on end to recover one’s own money from the bank was unbearable, true. But for most Indians it was no worse than the lives they live, where corruption dogs them at every step. That is why Narendra Modi has their support. They are happy that someone out there is ready to take on the corrupt instead of joining the loot. That is why over 10 lakh people turned up to listen to him at the Parivartan rally in Lucknow on Monday. For them he is a break with the past, a promise for the future. True or not, history will tell. For now, they continue to believe he can win the war against corruption.

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